Thursday, July 23, 2015

84: Adding a Small Monitor

I'm installing an Rpi away from my iMac and SSH. So I bought a cheap keyboard and a 7" 1024x600 HDMI monitor.  To make this work, you first need to make the following change:

% sudo nano /boot/config.txt
(delete the "#" from this line)
#disable_overscan=1

(delete the "#" and change 1280 to 1024)
#framebuffer_width=1280
(delete the "#" and change 720 to 600)
#framebuffer_height=720

(press CTRL/o, type y, press CTRL/x)
% sudo reboot

I then needed to enlarge the console font size from 6x16 pixels to something I could read. I did it like this:


When you log in to Linux (or Unix) a file named ".profile" is executed by the shell. To make the little screen readable I edited the .profile file and added the following line at the end:
setfont /usr/share/consolefonts/Uni3-Terminus28x14.pst.gz
(another reboot)
The 14x28 pixel font works for me. There many (hundreds of) fonts. If you like a bit smaller try 24x12 or bigger 32x16.